STORY: "Falsely accused of satanic horrors, a couple spent 21 years in prison. Now they’re owed millions," by reporter Avi Salk, published by The Wasington Post on August 26, 2017. (Avi Selk is an American-Canadian nomad. He reported for the Dallas Morning News from 2009 until December 2016, when he joined the general assignment desk.)
PHOTO CAPTION: "Dan and Fran Keller were wrongfully accused of child sexual assault and accused of practicing satanism in 1992.
GIST: Long before the age of the Internet and the fleeting spasms of mass hysteria that came with it (Remember Jade Helm? Pizzagate?), and going back to the late 20th century, when irrational fears moved slower and lasted longer, there was Satan. The “satanic panic,” some call it now. It began some time in the 1980s, when newscasters and fundamentalist Christian cartoons warned of the evils of the role-playing game “Dungeons and Dragons,” and stretched into the 1990s, when police and psychiatrists saw thousands of unfounded accusations of ritualistic sex abuse and children were seized from British parents accused of devil worship. One case still stands out.
“This country hasn’t seen anything like it since the Salem witch trials,” Texas Monthly wrote in 1994, in a profile of Austin day-care operators Dan and Fran Keller, who had been thrown in prison two years earlier. The Kellers had been convicted of sexual assault in 1992. Children from their day-care center accused them — variously — of serving blood-laced Kool Aid; wearing white robes; cutting the heart out of a baby; flying children to Mexico to be raped by soldiers; using Satan’s arm as a paintbrush; burying children alive with animals; throwing them in a swimming pool with sharks; shooting them; and resurrecting them after they had been shot. They were hardly the only people to be accused by children during the panic. Many were exonerated long ago — like the 20 people wrongly convicted in the infamous Kern County sex abuse cases. Some now blame the phenomenon on “a quack cadre of psychotherapists who were convinced that they could dig up buried memories through hypnosis,” as Radley Balko wrote in a column for The Washington Post. But the Kellers suffered for decades. They served nearly 22 years in prison before a court released them in 2013, after years of work by journalists and lawyers to expose what proved to be a baseless case against them. And only now — when Fran Keller is 67 and Dan is 75 — has the couple been fully exonerated. Their 1992 case was finally dismissed in June after a district attorney declared them innocent. This week, the Austin American-Statesman reported, they were awarded $3.4 million from a state fund — a belated attempt to refund a quarter-century that they lost to the delusions of other people. “We can start living,” Fran Keller told the newspaper after learning of the award Tuesday. “No more nightmares.” Read on - at the link below - for Selk's superb account of the incredible (in every sense of the word) evidence which led to the convictions - and for the Keller's struggle for redemption)."
The entire story can be found at:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2017/08/24/accused-of-satanism-they-spent-21-years-in-prison-they-were-just-declared-innocent-and-were-paid-millions/?utm_term=.fff7b5ffdedc
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/c
